What you need to know about stem cell therapy
i’m a physician
meaning i do practice medicine every
single day
the way we practice medicine
historically and nowadays
is what we call reactive we react
or respond to certain changes our human
bodies go through change is caused by
infections inflammations injuries
or aging related changes as a
cardiologist sometimes i act like an
a plumber dealing with clogged pipes to
try to
reopen them or i feel like an
electrician dealing with arrhythmias
irregularities of the heart using
electric devices
but by doing so we try to prevent
further damage but we really do not
repair any damage which has
occurred already in our bodies on the
other hand stem cells or stem cell
therapy in particular
is a new way of thinking nowadays
to change the paradigm from
reactive medicine to reparative or
regenerative medicine and you all have
heard about stem cell therapy
you heard about some celebrities from
hollywood going to remote islands to
have some
intravenous stem cell injections for
so-called anti-aging purposes
or we have heard about football players
having their knees injected in europe
and all of them show amazing results
if you do an internet search on stem
cell therapy
within 0.54 seconds you get 450 million
hits that’s more hits than the pope gets
and if you look at those hits
on the web the vast majority are
actually from companies
who try to sell you stem cell therapy
advertising
rather than really scientific data
so within the next few minutes i would
like to tell you a little bit about stem
cell therapy what we know
today how it all started and by doing so
i want to guide you first to what we do
in medicine right now
and i will show you some of our own
early experimental studies using stem
cells
followed by a few anecdotal case reports
in human patients
and then at the end i want to give you a
take home message what all of you should
know
about stem cell therapy which is
probably one of the most promising
advantages and advances in modern
medicine today
i’m a soccer player i’m on the outside
on the
left hand this picture was sent to me
just recently
by someone from germany uh dated i think
and in germany playing soccer is like a
religion like many many other countries
as you know and we all
remember the famous quote of the german
soccer coach seb herberger de bal este
haunt
which means the ball is round it sounds
simple but has actually
significant philosophical meanings i
took another picture that’s a year ago
i’m still playing soccer more or less
and
by looking at those pictures side by
side i noticed well
i look a little different right i mean
there’s some change obviously with ages
40 years in between those pictures
almost
and i remember the famous quote of
heraklet of
ephesus saying nothing nothing is
permanent
except change so and medicine nowadays
deals with those changes patients come
to the doctor’s office or the hospitals
because they have symptoms for example
chest pain
or they have injuries as an example a
broken leg
or they have chronic degenerative
changes arthritis in the knees
or an inflammation in the skin or loss
of function or loss of tissue
all these are changes we deal with in
medicine
and traditionally many of our organs
such as the heart and the brain are
considered
differentiated organs that means the
cells we have in our heart today
are the same cells we were born with so
once there is some damage
we can’t repair them even though we do
have some stem cell potential in our
bodies
we lost the power to repair
a large amount of damage so as a
cardiologist we put
plasters and bandages on damage rather
than
repairing it i just wanted to show you
briefly a case of a young man i saw a
few days ago now a 49 year old man
he came with new onset of chest pain and
was diagnosed with a heart attack
so we took him to the cardiac
catheterization laboratory where we take
a catheter from the groin or from the
arm into the heart inject contrast
die into the arteries which is shown
here
and in that particular case the right
coronarity was completely blocked
meaning there’s lack of oxygen in large
portions of the heart which can lead to
death
so as i mentioned like a plumber we go
ahead
with drills and wires and balloons and
metal rings which we call stents
open up that tube and the blood flow is
established
and heart attack is treated there’s
other ways of course
to treat heart damage if it’s more
severe we might have to do
open heart surgery as shown here
sometimes even
on the beating heart where we use what
we call bypass grafts to overcome
blocked arteries we use those grafts
from the legs or from the chest of the
same patient
and basically bypass the blockages in
order to treat
the coronary artery disease or in more
extreme cases
we take the whole organ out we do what
we call a cardiac transplantation
but this is a major surgery of course
and this is more regeneration than
repair
but there’s only 2 200 heart transplants
done per year in the united states but
there’s
more than 6 million patients suffering
from
heart failure so what leads to those
damages and diseases in a large part
it’s aging
and we all age differently as you know
and of
interest there are certain species who
don’t age or
were even immortal some fungi for
example
are immortal and this picture shows a
shark a greenland shark who is supposed
to be
512 years old
so how come that a shark can live
hundreds of years while our life span as
humans is usually less than 80 years of
age
so obviously he eats a lot of fish and
swims a lot that might help
but of interest sharks have an unlimited
regeneration of their teeth because of
an
abundance of stem cells in their body so
if they lose
teeth they can replace them and that
might play a role
in the long age so what are stem cells
stem cells are unique
cells which have the ability to develop
into any cell in our body whether it’s a
brain cell a fat cell
a skin cell a bone cell a heart cell
whatsoever
and in the embryonic stage in in utero
stem cells are responsible for the
development
of our organs
we have to learn from nature if you cut
off
the limp of a reptile of a salamander
for example
due to an abundance of stem cells in
their system
this reptile is able to to completely
regrow
that limb so they don’t lose it and we
as humans by the way have the same
ability but only
during the first four months in utero
after that
the lymph is cut off we lose it
so let me tell you briefly how we
started stem cell therapy and we were
among the first in the world using
embryonic cells in experimental animals
where we took the hearts of pregnant
animals
out took the stem cells from the heart
and injected
those in recipient animals in which we
created
heart attacks before into the border
zone as shown here
of scar tissue damaged tissue and by use
of staining techniques and fluorescence
microscopy
we could demonstrate for the first time
that those cells
from other animals basically could
survive within the recipient
for up to six months and moreover
that led to an improvement of the
contractile function
meaning the strength of the heart in
those
animals from the experimental
view let me just tell you a few case
reports this lady
on the right is an 87 year old lady
a patient of mine who came to us a
couple of years ago
with severe what we call coronary artery
disease blockages in the arteries not
amenable
for any interventional or surgical
therapy in fact
this lady was so symptomatic that she
could not even leave her house to go to
the mailbox
to get her mail because she a chest pain
and was short of breath
so the only option was an experimental
approach
intravenous stem cell injection so after
three months
she was basically completely
asymptomatic
after six months she traveled the world
on her own flew back to japan
was walking through the mall no symptoms
whatsoever
that six years ago still doing extremely
well that’s a
single case but let me tell you about
another case
this is a young man 32 years of age who
was admitted to a large academic
hospital in los
angeles with a very rare condition which
we call
calcify lexus which means that he
hardened all his arteries with the
entire body the kidneys failed was in
dialysis he had several heart attacks
his colon
ruptured three times and the entire
integument meaning the skin
of the body fall off in fact this
condition has a mortality
of more than 90 percent meaning 90 or
more
percent of people have it they die
within a month
so i was asked to put this patient on
hospice but we
refused to do so he’s 32 years old
so we treated him several times with
stem cells and of interest
after 14 months being in the hospital he
left
he did lose both of his legs he still
was on dialysis but he is alive
way too surprised to all the doctors
involved in this case nobody had
expected that
because the stem cells helped basically
to rebuild
and repair some of the damage in his
organs
so how do stem cells work now so there’s
different hypothesis but let me just
show you the the main modes of action if
you wish
the first mode of action is
anti-inflammatory they fight
inflammation
so if you have a heart attack for
example this is always affiliated with
the local inflammation in the organ and
this slide on the lower
portion shows you injections three times
of stem cells
and then we measured the tissue content
in the heart muscle of inflammatory
parameters
which showed a significant reaction uh
with regard to reduction of the
inflammation
after every single injection in addition
on the upper portion of this graft
it shows the left ventricular function
the strength of the heart
compared to in red placebo treated group
and which showed the same thing that the
injection of stem cell
improved the strength of the heart
versus placebo or standard therapy did
not
in addition there’s what we call
angiogenesis
the build up of new blood vessels
this is a picture of an experimental
animal where the femoral artery
is completely occluded and we injected
stem cells
into the tissue and here you can see
hundreds of
new blood vessels capillaries and
arterioles
which try to save the limb by providing
oxygen to the extremity this is what we
call angiogenesis
or arteriogenesis induced by stem cell
therapy
and it works thirdly there’s
regeneration
or paracrine effects and in particular
in the heart
several studies have shown that there is
some degree of regeneration if we inject
stem cells directly in the heart the
stem cells are able
to conform and to develop into
contracting heart muscle cells who are
then able to contract in synchrony
with the recipient cells other people
don’t believe that there’s a complete
regeneration only a partial but there
might be pyroclean effect
meaning the stem cells might be able to
strengthen the surrounding
healthy tissue which also in turn then
leads to an improvement of the function
but there’s always bad news about
everything
and if you look in the news there’s a
lot of
announcement for example from the fda
the federal drug administration
stating that stem cell therapy is not
fda
approved we do it in the frame of
clinical studies but it’s not an
approved treatment
and the fda wants against
undifferentiated use
of stem cells on the other hand two
years ago
where several news reports about 18
patients
all over the country in the u.s were
ended up in emergency rooms with blood
infection sepsis
as a result of one single intravenous
stem cell injection from one particular
lab and as a consequence of that the fda
shut down that lab and shut down several
providers offices
who obviously did not conform to fda and
other industry regulations
and didn’t use cleanliness to ensure
non-contamination of their products so
be cautious about that
on a positive side we see positive
reports in the news this is a young man
at the university of southern california
was completely paralyzed after an
accident
and after stem cell injections into the
spine connected to the brain
those cells were able to regenerate in
part neurons
nerve cells and now we can move his arms
which couldn’t be found even can lift
some weights
as you can see here so let me just
summarize about the myth the missus is
stem cell therapy fda approved no
it’s not at this point do stem cells
cure certain diseases
no don’t believe it some people make
false claims about that
with the exception of stem cell
transplantation in certain forms of
cancer
but this is a different story some
people might tell you stem cells have no
side effects no
that’s not true either we not even know
the long-term effects
there’s some data that cancer cells
might be
promoted even with stem cell injection
there might be some immune responses
so there’s a lot of unknowns at this
point
stem cell injections can be performed by
anyone definitely
not i recently had actually actually a
technician coming to my
office trying to sell me stem cells from
his company
the same time i had a patient in the
next room behind my back the technician
went to the patient went to his house
and actually injected him
in the knee with his product unethical
and professional and lawful
not everybody should do that all labs
provide high quality products
no this is wishful thinking but we in
our experience
we have seen a lot of non-conformity
to regulations facts are that stem cell
therapy nowadays is the most promising
advance in modern medicine stem cells
have a responsibility to repair damage
and heal they decline in quality
and quantity in our body the older we
get the less potent stem cells we have
they do induce a natural healing but
sometimes need to be
mediated from the outside but again
nothing is permanent
except change so at the end let me just
briefly mention covert since we
underground
pandemic this is a chinese doctor who
injected nine patients with severe covet
infections in china wuhan
with one single intravenous injection of
stem cells they all recover
this is non-randomized control but i can
tell you we did our own study randomized
placebo control double blind
with amazing results soon to be
published
so if you consider as a potential
consumer in patient stem cell therapy
ask questions
ask the provider about their own
experience their publications
where do they get the sales from which
labs
what is their reputation but keep in
mind
we are in the process of changing from
reactive
to regenerative medicine for acute
injuries but also for chronic
degenerative diseases
and this is the future of medicine
thank you
you